Acceptable Use Policy for Outbound Email

As a committed anti-spam product, Proofpoint Essentials cannot condone the use of our platform to send out bulk mail.  Most users respect our fair usage policy and instead use dedicated email marketing systems to send out their bulk mail campaigns.  Unfortunately, there will always be a small number of users who, often unwittingly, abuse the system and may end up affecting the quality of service we can provide for everyone and of course the sending of spam through Proofpoint Essentials is strictly prohibited.

Additionally, if a user has unwittingly downloaded a spambot from the internet (or been infected by such a virus), in sending out huge quantities of email that user could inadvertently be distributing said bot to their entire contact base.  Thus, by placing per-user limitations on Outbound usage, Proofpoint Essentials not only protects the system as a whole, but also the customer’s as well as the user’s reputation.

Outbound limits to control bulk mail abuse

In order to prevent the sending of spam and bulk mail through our system we have the following limitation in place:

Users are only permitted to send out 100 emails over a 10 minute period or 500 emails over a 24 hour period.

What happens if a user reaches the outbound limit?

If a user hits the outbound limit of 100 emails within 10 minutes they will automatically be prevented from sending out any more email until their moving average of the past 10 minutes drops below the limit.

Additionally, if the user sends out email slow enough to avoid the first trigger, but hits a moving average of 500 emails per 24 hours, further email will also be prevented until this moving average drops below the limit.

The measure that is taken when a limit is reached is that the email is bounced back to the sender.  It is critically needed that the sender be notified immediately of this event, otherwise a silent queue will just grow on the customer’s server without anybody being notified, and if the queue continues to grow, it may grow to such a size to cause other problems.

Will these consequences affect the entire organisation?

No, Proofpoint Essentials will not punish other users within an organisation because of the abusive usage or misfortune of one user.  Only the outbound abilities of the user responsible for sending the bulk mail will be affected.

Can exceptions be made?

A bulk sender exception can be made in cases where necessary. The bulk sender exception limit is:

Users can send out 2,000 emails over a 10 minute period or 10,000 emails over a 24 hour period.

Please contact support if you require an exception to be made for a specific user.